Friday, July 7, 2017

Top Ethics Chief Announces Resignation After Months Long Battle To Drain The Trump Administration Swamp

Walter Shaub Jr. announced Thursday that he will resign, effective July 19, as director of the Office of Government Ethics.

Here is his full resignation letter to Donald Trump...

Click to enlarge

The resignation comes after months of tension between Shaub and Donald Trump

The problems between the two began when Trump announced after his election win that he would become the first president in the modern era to refuse to divest or separate himself from his holdings. This rightfully caused Shaub to sharply criticize the plan for failing to meet the standard that “every president of the past four decades has met.”

Shaub told the media that Donald Trump’s businesses certainly appears to be profiting from his tenure in the White House but he couldn't definitively tell whether Trump and his family were in fact using the office to enrich themselves.

Despite that Shaub claimed that it “doesn’t matter” if the Trump family is or isn’t making financial gains...

"The effect is that there’s an appearance that the businesses are profiting from his occupying the presidency. And appearance matters as much as reality. So even aside from whether or not that’s actually happening, we need to send a message to the world that the United States is gonna have the gold standard for an ethics program in government, which is what we’ve always had. (...) America should have the right to know what the motivations of its leaders are, and they need to know that financial interests, personal financial interests, aren’t among them,”

The Office of Government Ethics, which was created in the wake of the Watergate scandal, typically works with presidential administrations to resolve possible conflicts of interest but Shaub struggled to connect with the Trump transition team after the election.

Shaub said he is planning to join the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that works on voting rights and campaign finance issues.

Shaub said that he didn’t believe there was much more he could have accomplished at the Office of Government Ethics, given the current situation, and that the timing was right for his departure. His new position with the nonprofit group will allow him to openly advocate for government ethics reforms.

Shaub's resignation marks the culmination of a months-long battle between his office and the man who once promised to “drain the swamp” of corruption in Washington.

The White House has accepted Mr. Shaub’s resignation and appreciates his service and added that...

“the President will be nominating a successor in short order.”

Shaub joined the ethics office as an attorney during the George W. Bush administration and was appointed director by Barack Obama.